“Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud,” is the story of a happy man known for his happy paintings of cakes and pies. It turns out he also has many happy things to say about painting. For example: “I love art history” and “I was a spoiled child. I had a great life, so about the only thing I can do is to paint happy pictures.”

The writing in “Delicious” is untroubled and straightforward, which is, apparently, like the man and the life it describes. There is no struggle in it at all. The story goes steadily from subject to verb, rung to rung, up the ladder of life and good fortune. “Wayne grew up in the American West,” we learn. “His mother, Alice, was a wonderful cook and baker.” His Uncle Jess was a cartoonist. When he was a kid, he wanted to be a cartoonist too, and he did become one for a while.

Events that other people might have found trying turn out to be nothing more than fine challenges: “Wayne broke his back playing football in his junior year of high school,” and “kept himself busy by drawing.” While still in school he got a job in the animation department at Walt Disney Studios, where he drew Goofy, Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket. During World War II, Thiebaud wanted to be a pilot, but instead became an Army artist, creating a comic strip called “Aleck.” After the war, when his career as a cartoonist didn’t pan out, he became an art director for the Rexall Drug Company and studied Michelangelo and Rubens. He kept drawing: “The more I drew, the more I improved.”

In the 1950s Thiebaud showed his early paintings at a drive-in theater in Sacramento, but he aimed for New York and, after a while, made it there. Thiebaud hung out with painters and became friends with Willem de Kooning. He painted pictures of pinball machines and gumball machines and topped them off with a layer of what he calls “arty strokes.”

By the 1960s Thiebaud got rid of the abstract expressionist glaze and replaced it with frosting — thick, slick strokes. He also found his subject: pies, candy and cakes. “Cakes, they are glorious, they are like toys.” His first painting of a row of pies made him laugh. But those paintings did not sell. A critic called him “the hungriest artist in California.” So Thiebaud looked for a gallery in New York. “His last stop” — isn’t it always the last stop? — “late one afternoon was the Allan Stone Gallery.” He and Stone became friends, and in April 1962 Thiebaud got a one-man show. Everything sold. And the rest is art history. Landscapes followed lollipops and portraits followed popsicles.

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The story of Wayne Thiebaud’s steady march to art stardom is not, however, all icing. The author of “Delicious,” Susan Goldman Rubin, who has also written books for young readers on Andy Warhol, Margaret Bourke-White and Edgar Degas, dives under the surface to examine Thiebaud’s pictures and his thoughts.

She discusses his love of creating a “spatial tension” between repeated forms (not all drum majorettes or candy apples look alike); his feelings about pop art (he does “not want to be lumped with Warhol,” whose work he finds “flat” and “mechanical”); his trouble conveying in a realistic mode “the scary feeling” of San Francisco’s plunging intersections; his penchant for outlining cupcakes in blue and green; his obsession with lighting (which he learned in the theater in high school) and shadow. (“He usually tries six or eight different shadow shapes to find the one that is just right.”)

Still, the general impression of “Delicious” — a cheerful monograph that includes an index and a bibliography and is punctuated with many large-print quotes from Thiebaud and colorful reproductions of his paintings — is of a flat, smooth road. He married, twice, and raised four kids, and all of them now do something or other with art. One son, Paul, who runs a gallery in Sacramento, is his art dealer. Now, at age 87, the artist is happily painting every day and playing tennis twice a week.

It’s enviable, but will it play with struggling child artists? It’s hard to know. Just as it’s hard to know whether the happy prose of the story is meant to match the artist’s voice and sentiment or not. The fact that Thiebaud is fond of signing his name with a heart (an upside down “W,” he says) is probably a clue, as are his earnest statements: “I think an artist’s capacity to handle the figure is a great test of his abilities.” That’s true. And an artist’s capacity to paint row upon row of cakes and pies is a great test of his sanity. This man must be crazy sane.

DELICIOUS

The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud.

By Susan Goldman Rubin.

108 pp. Chronicle Books. $15.95. (Ages 9 to 14)

Sarah Boxer is the author of a cartoon novel, “In the Floyd Archives,” and the editor of a blog anthology, “Ultimate Blogs.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR 19 of the New York edition with the headline: Life Is Sweet. Today's Paper|Subscribe